Several weeks ago I was sitting in a Thames side pub talking
with a couple of poets whose names may be familiar to this list,
Fred Beake and Tim Love. The conversation turned to an issue which
has recently been raised here (in regard to Charles Tomlinson and
other poets): what poetry one likes, and how one decides that one
likes it. I confessed that throughout my life, the standard I have
applied was that if the first line and a half of a poem struck me as
good, the poem was going to be worth reading and remembering, and if
the first line and a half was boring, the poem was not going to be
worth bothering about.
My test is obviously open to a number of strenuous objections,
which Fred and Tim were too polite to throw at me (or perhaps they
just felt sorry for me because I had the mother of all colds, which
in fact I am still coughing a little from.) Such an approach may be
called superficial, judging as it does from a tiny sample; unfair,
because a poet has a right to expect to be judged on complete works;
and lazy, since it reveals a reader unwilling to do the work
necessary to appreciate a poets style and meaning.
Yet the method has very rarely -- I would say never -- let me
down: both the favorable and unfavorable judgements I have made by
it still seem valid to me, in many cases after decades of rereading
the good ones and also through honest attempts to re-evaluate the
uninteresting ones. A more important justification is that the
poems which I've selected as my favorites over the years by this
method form a pretty respectable body of work. My favorite poems
are by Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Propertius, Shakespeare,
Campion, Keats, Shelley, Pound, Eliot, Whitman, Stevens, Williams,
Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, and other names of that stature, and
this list really was put together, not by paying attention to
literary teachers or critics, but by reading around in various
sources and watching out for that tingle at the beginning. You
can't argue with success. Well, actually you can, but I won't.
Some people may object to my way of developing a poetic taste
because it doesn't involve approaching poetry with fear and
trembling, as something you have to work at. Well why should it. I
think such obsequiousness towards verse is a mark of how poorly
poetry is integrated into our society. We don't find a similar
pompous anxiety in people's approach to arts which we really
consider part of our culture, like film or popular music -- few
people say "You would like Michael Jackson if you only *studied*
him." Our attitude towards arts that we consider to be our genuine
cultural property is that everyone has every right to like them or
not on whatever basis they wish. It's only in peripheral arts like
poetry that people seem to feel a moral imperative to show support
for individual works just because they are examples of that
particular art. Perhaps it would help to restore poetry to a more
respectable place in our culture if people showed less respect for
it.
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